Drop in game prices

[DaRkLiGhTeR]

I was doing my daily look through CVG's articles when i came across this:
http://www.computerandvideogames.com/article.php?id=247554

It seems that Namco wants to reduce the prices of new video games as there are too many coming out at once for everyone to buy all of them "From September to December there are  three new blockbusters every week, and consumers just can't afford to  buy all that."

Now I'm all for that but he says states that they should make games shorter as well as cheaper and then stretch them out afterwards with DLC. Any thoughts?

[T-Bag]

Ã,£20 for 4-5 Hours is a bit of a joke. On the PC we've been buying new games that are the same length as the console ones for Ã,£20-30 on release day. It's yet another way to rip console games off more. DLC has a much smaller development cost for them, and a much shorter game time.So say you buy a game for Ã,£20 and get 5 hours. For Ã,£3-6 you get a 1-2 hour bolt on to the game. So by the time you bulked out the game those developers are Ã,£65 better off, which for them is a profit of Ã,£25 over the traditional way. Of course a lazy games company would want to do this.

A 15 hour adventure is the case he mentions as a comparison. Ã,£40 for 15 hours = Ã,£2.67 an hour. Ã,£20 for 5 hours = Ã,£4 an hour. Says it all.

And lets go back to the original reason for this. People can't afford all the games. So you make them cheaper and then they have more games to play, but the Gameplay:Cost ratio is skewed, so they have a load of games that they've all completed, rather than a small amount they're still playing though. Means they'll have to buy the DLC...but wait they've already spent the same amount of money they would have before on games, so what they're actually asking the customer to do is to spend the same amount they would normally on games and then add 40% extra to this.

If you were to only spend the same amount of games as before you'd wind up with ~40% less game for the same amount of cash.

I'm glad I'm a PC gamer or this would really upset me.